This Is What Nobody Tells You About Being an Olympic Athlete

It's not all fun and games, no pun intended.

A new piece in The Atlantic casts light on an undiscussed element of the Olympics: the crash when it's all over. Sports psychologists have called the feeling a post-Olympic depression, and it seems to affect most athletes, regardless of whether they won or lost during the games.

"Think about the rollercoaster ride prior to the Olympics, and just how fast and hectic that mad dash is," the director of the Performance Psychology Center at the University of Michigan, Scott Goldman, told The Atlantic. "This ninety-mile-per-hour or hundred-mile-per-hour ride comes to a screeching halt the second the Olympics are over."

"[The athletes] are just exhausted," he added. "It was such an onslaught to their system. And when it’s all said and done, they’re just physiologically depleted, as well as psychologically."

Writers John Florio and Ousie Shapiro compare this feeling to the come-down from major life experiences, like getting married or having a baby, however, the slope is so steep for Olympic athletes, it can be difficult to pull out of the downward spiral. "Some find themselves at such a loss they can’t stop the slide," Florio and Shapiro write. "And [they can] wind up in a clinical depression."

Fortunately, there is hope, and the psychologists who coined the term have found success by reminding Olympic athletes of the accomplishments that pushed them to such a peak.

"I need to remind athletes that the skills and personality traits that they possess, that pushed them and propelled them to such excellence in the domain of sport, are transferable," Goldman said. "If they find something else that they love, then they can transfer all of that passion and work ethic, grit, and resilience and creativity and adaptability into their next phase of interest."